I'm one of those people who don't have a great use for metadata files, and Premiere seems to flood my drives with pek files, cfa files and xmp files - which I spend time just deleting so I see my movie files.

Is there a way to either stop these being generated or organise these files all to be dumped in the same place, away from my captured files?

.CFA and .PEK files are needed for editng. You can designate where they are stored in preferences. CFA = conformed audio for allowing you to edit audio at all and PEK = peak files for showing the wave from.

You are close. Under Scratch Disks, you will be looking at Audio Previews and also Media Cache. The CFA (which is a WAV file) and the PEK are not really metadata files, as Harm points out. The first is the Audio, which has been Conformed to 32-bit floating point .WAV's, and the Waveform Display files, .PEK's.

Also, when you Import an AV file, give the program time to Conform Audio (and generate the .PEK files), before you begin using those Imported files. There is a little blue progress bar at the lower-right of the GUI.

Another tip: you can delete the CFA's and the PEK files. If they are needed in the Project, they will be regenerated. See the warning above about giving the program time to do the work.